I am trying to write some information into the file, which is located in
ftp, and this file can be updated by number of people, but if at all i
download a file from the ftp to my local machine, update it and then
upload it back to ftp, and at the same time if some one else downloads
the same file for the modification, then the data will be overwritten.
so is there a way in Python script where i can lock the file, so that
no one updates it until i release the lock
Look at fuser
It is unclear if you need to know for debugging purposes or to support a feature in the code but this is the method call to get the pid of the current executing process.
import os
print "Process id:",os.getpid()
This will simply dump the id to output and you can put other information of interest there so you can follow which is what.
Is this what you are looking for? If not, please clarify and I'll try again.
Related
Files are being pushed to my server via FTP. I process them with PHP code in a Drupal module. O/S is Ubuntu and the FTP server is vsftp.
At regular intervals I will check for new files, process them with SimpleXML and move them to a "Done" folder. How do I avoid processing a partially uploaded file?
vsftp has lock_upload_files defaulted to yes. I thought of attempting to move the files first, expecting the move to fail on a currently uploading file. That doesn't seem to happen, at least on the command line. If I start uploading a large file and move, it just keeps growing in the new location. I guess the directory entry is not locked.
Should I try fopen with mode 'a' or 'r+' just to see if it succeeds before attempting to load into SimpleXML or is there a better way to do this? I guess I could just detect SimpleXML load failing but... that seems messy.
I don't have control of the sender. They won't do an upload and rename.
Thanks
Using the lock_upload_files configuration option of vsftpd leads to locking files with the fcntl() function. This places advisory lock(s) on uploaded file(s) which are in progress. Other programs don't need to consider advisory locks, and mv for example does not. Advisory locks are in general just an advice for programs that care about such locks.
You need another command line tool like lockrun which respects advisory locks.
Note: lockrun must be compiled with the WAIT_AND_LOCK(fd) macro to use the lockf() and not the flock() function in order to work with locks that are set by fcntl() under Linux. So when lockrun is compiled with using lockf() then it will cooperate with the locks set by vsftpd.
With such features (lockrun, mv, lock_upload_files) you can build a shell script or similar that moves files one by one, checking if the file is locked beforehand and holding an advisory lock on it as long as the file is moved. If the file is locked by vsftpd then lockrun can skip the call to mv so that running uploads are skipped.
If locking doesn't work, I don't know of a solution as clean/simple as you'd like. You could make an educated guess by not processing files whose last modified time (which you can get with filemtime()) is within the past x minutes.
If you want a higher degree of confidence than that, you could check and store each file's size (using filesize()) in a simple database, and every x minutes check new size against its old size. If the size hasn't changed in x minutes, you can assume nothing more is being sent.
The lsof linux command lists opened files on your system. I suggest executing it with shell_exec() from PHP and parsing the output to see what files are still being used by your FTP server.
Picking up on the previous answer, you could copy the file over and then compare the sizes of the copied file and the original file at a fixed interval.
If the sizes match, the upload is done, delete the copy, work with the file.
If the sizes do not match, copy the file again.
repeat.
Here's another idea: create a super (but hopefully not root) FTP user that can access some or all of the upload directories. Instead of your PHP code reading uploaded files right off the disk, make it connect to the local FTP server and download files. This way vsftpd handles the locking for you (assuming you leave lock_upload_files enabled). You'll only be able to download a file once vsftp releases the exclusive/write lock (once writing is complete).
You mentioned trying flock in your comment (and how it fails). It does indeed seem painful to try to match whatever locking vsftpd is doing, but dio_fcntl might be worth a shot.
I guess you've solved your problem years ago but still.
If you use some pattern to find the files you need you can ask the party uploading the file to use different name and rename the file once the upload has completed.
You should check the Hidden Stores in proftp, more info here:
http://www.proftpd.org/docs/directives/linked/config_ref_HiddenStores.html
I'm working on a script that should check on certain system events (like opening of a file, or changing of a registry key) and start further actions depending on that. But I haven't found a clean way to get the information into my script.
I'm looking for a way to get the output of Sysinternals Process Monitor into another program. This should happen without user interaction in close to real time; so saving into a CSV/XML and than using this doesn't work.
I've checked on using the backing file, but this is in the Process Monitor PML format, which i haven't found to be documented anywhere.
Does anybody know a way how I can get the output of Process Monitor into my script?
Or an other (not too messy) way to get a real time list of opened files, registry keys etc into a python program?
Thanks!
If you want to parse stdout or a file, and your ok with a 32 bit only solution, try Dr Strace or ntstrace.
YOu could also look into ospy or another ProcMon alternative. ospy is open source, so at the very least you could look at the source code for capturing events.
Here is a list of alternates to ProcMon.
Firstly I am new to Python.
Now my question goes like this:
I have a call back script running in remote machine
which sends some data and run a script in local machine
which process that data and write to a file. Now another
script of mine locally needs to process the file data
one by one and delete them from the file if done.
The problem is the file may be updating continuoulsy.
How do i schyncronize the work so that it doesnt mess up
my file.
Also please suggest me if the same work can be done in some
better way.
I would suggest you to look into named pipes or sockets which seem to be more suited for your purpose than a file. If it's really just between those two applications and you have control on the source code of both.
For example, on unix, you could create a pipe like (see os.mkfifo):
import os
os.mkfifo("/some/unique/path")
And then access it like a file:
dest = open("/some/unique/path", "w") # on the sending side
src = open("/some/unique/path", "r") # on the reading side
The data will be queued between your processes. It's a First In First Out really, but it behaves like a file (mostly).
If you cannot go for named pipes like this, I'd suggest to use IP sockets over localhost from the socket module, preferably DGRAM sockets, as you do not need to do some connection handling there. You seem to know how to do networking already.
I would suggest using a database whose transactions allow for concurrent processing.
i need to watch a folder for incoming files. i did that with the following help:
How do I watch a file for changes?
the problem is that the files that are being moved are pretty big (10gb)
and i want to be notified when all files are done moving.
i tried comparing the size of the folder every 20 seconds but the file shows its correct size even tough windows shows that it is still moving.
i am using windows with python
i found a solution using open and waiting for an io exception.
if the file is still being moved i get errno 13.
You should take a look at this link:
http://timgolden.me.uk/python/win32_how_do_i/watch_directory_for_changes.html
There you can see the comparison of the method you are speaking about (simple polling) with two other windows-specific techniques which, in my opinion, offers a really better solution to your problem!
Otherwise, if you are using linux, there's iNotify and the relative Python wrapper:
Pyinotify is a pure Python module used
for monitoring filesystems events on
Linux platforms through inotify
Here: http://trac.dbzteam.org/pyinotify
If you have control over the process of importing the files, I would put a lock file when starting to copy files in, and remove it when you are done. by lock file I mean a tmp empty file, which is just there to indicate that you are coping a file. then your py script can check for the existence of the lock files.
You may be able to use os.stat() to monitor the mtime of the file. However be aware that under various network conditions, the copy may stall momentarily and so the mtime is not updated for a few seconds, so you need to make allowance for this.
Another option is to try opening the file with exclusive read/write which should fail under windows if the file is still opened by the other process
The most reliable method would be to write your own program to move the files.
try checking for the last-modified time change instead of the filesize during your poll.
We have several cron jobs that ftp proxy logs to a centralized server. These files can be rather large and take some time to transfer. Part of the requirement of this project is to provide a logging mechanism in which we log the success or failure of these transfers. This is simple enough.
My question is, is there a way to check if a file is currently being written to? My first solution was to just check the file size twice within a given timeframe and check the file size. But a co-worker said that there may be able to hook into the EXT3 file system via python and check the attributes to see if the file is currently being appended to. My Google-Fu came up empty.
Is there a module for EXT3 or something else that would allow me to check the state of a file? The server is running Fedora Core 9 with EXT3 file system.
no need for ext3-specific hooks; just check lsof, or more exactly, /proc/<pid>/fd/* and /proc/<pid>/fdinfo/* (that's where lsof gets it's info, AFAICT). There you can check if the file is open, if it's writeable, and the 'cursor' position.
That's not the whole picture; but any more is done in processpace by stdlib on the writing process, as most writes are buffered and the kernel only sees bigger chunks of data, so any 'ext3-aware' monitor wouldn't get that either.
There's no ext3 hooks to check what you'd want directly.
I suppose you could dig through the source code of Fuser linux command, replicate the part that finds which process owns a file, and watch that resource. When noone longer has the file opened, it's done transferring.
Another approach:
Your cron jobs should tell that they're finished.
We have our cron jobs that transport files just write an empty filename.finished after it's transferred the filename. Another approach is to transfer them to a temporary filename, e.g. filename.part and then rename it to filename Renaming is atomic. In both cases you check repeatedly until the presence of filename or filename.finished